Saw the F&F6 movie today, i didn't see the video of your Hako up there but maybe it was only there for the premiere or only in sydney or something. I was also surprised that i didn't see them pick or look at some JNCs when they went looking for some different cars than the BMWs they had.

_________________Car(s): 1990 Nissan N13 Pulsar - Wrecked1986 Toyota MX73 CressidaAnything posted is the thoughts of this user and are not that of Scifleet Motors or any related company."Never assume you know what you're doing. Because you're doing it wrong."

I reckon it's fair to say that nothing quite brightens up my day, as much as a care package from Japan

Ooh...I wonder what this could be.

There's plenty of cool stuff, but But first, the easy part. My reverse lights are in reasonable condition...

...but one side is cracked, the rubber gasket a bit crazed and the whole thing has been blackened by soot from the exhaust.

They remove easily enough. Not by unscrewing the lens from the front, but by unbolting them from behind the bumper.

Interestingly, the new ones have a little wodge of felt in the drain hole. I wonder if this is to filter out the soot from the exhaust pipes, which seems to work its way inside and blacken it from the inside out.

Much better! (and yes I know it's crooked in this pic, we sorted it out later)

One other item in the package were new door striker rubbers. You might recall that my original ones disintegrated, and I found that while 510 ones are smaller, they can be stretched over the Hako striker as a temporary measure.

New rubbers now installed, and the doors click closed nice and solidly now.

Sorry for the lack of updates in recent times, guys...what happened was that 3yrs ago, I went and bought a fancy-car to use as a daily, and in the end it turned out to be really, really maintenance intensive, to the point where I didn't have time to work on the Hako! Anyway, it got sold about a month ago, so we can go back to regular programming

Christmas holidays are a time to clear your mind of work, and spend some quality time with your loved ones (oh, and your family too).

Boxing Day meant that while everyone else was in the house trying to think of ways to use up 20kg of leftover ham, I get to be in the garage playing with Christmas presents.

First job of the day was to fit the awesome new tension arms from Techno Toy Tuning. Gabe from T3 makes plenty of products and is a passionate supporter of J-tin, but when parts for the Hako appeared on the T3 site, I was quite bowled over! Aftermarket parts from a US vendor...for a Japan-only car! Many thanks to the SoCal Hako-owning community for helping to make this happen.

The T3 pieces are beautifully made, and are remarkably stout, with a heim joint that is approximately the size of my fist

So off come the stock tension arms...

The T3 arms are adjustable, so before I remove the stock arms, I measure the length in place.

The T3 arms look like they'll happily survive a bomb blast, and are much bigger than the stock arms

One difference I noted about the T3 arms are that they are straight at the flange, whereas the Hako ones have a little angle. We will explore the ramifications of this anon.

Another critical difference is that the T3 arms are solid mounted to the chassis via these special washers, rather than rubber-bushed.

Installation's pretty simple, I dismantled the T3 arms, then bolted one side to the suspension, and the other side to the chassis.

Then I wind down the coilovers, and jack up the suspension arm a little...then it's an easy matter of muscling the two bits together and bolting it up.

I left the two bolts at the wheel-end of the T3 arm a little loose, so that once it's bolted up, the arm can find its natural angle against the suspension arm. Once the heim joint is done up, I tighten the suspension end up all the way. Before I move on, I jack the suspension up and down, to make sure the heim joint is at the right angle, and doesn't bottom out rotationally as the suspension moves.

Straight away, I notice that the (straight) T3 arms have put the suspension arm at quite an extreme amount of twist. Compare the stock passenger-side vs the T3'd driver's side suspension arm.

Gabe from T3 said that this wasn't a concern, and was a result of the Hako having very long droop travel, and the longest suspension arms of any Datsun. Once it was at normal ride height, Gabe said, it would all settle at a more normal angle and be fine....and so it did! The suspension arm is still at a slight angle, but you can see in the foreground of this pic, that the rubber suspension bush isn't distorted in any meaningful way...well not enough to be worried about anyway.

The next job is to replace the steering tie rods. Now, popping ball joints out requires quite a lot of force, and I find that with old cars, they're really jammed in there and the usual picklefork method of hammering out the ball joints seldom works. Picklefirks work fine on newer cars, but with old junk, you often find that at least one or two of them won't yield, and so you have to come up with a better solution anyway. The one method I find is quite foolproof are these things:

You tap them into place as deep as possible with a hammer, then start to wind the jaws together...and then there'll be a loud "BANG!", and the tool and the tie rods will fly halfway across the garage. Hmm...I wonder which are the new ones...they look so alike

The new tie rods are from Victory50, and look like they are parts from a later Nissan, but modified for use on a Hako. The ball joint head is a later non-greasable type, and is smaller. The threads look like they've been machined down to be compatible with Hako, and the taper looks like it's had an insert pressed onto it. We've found that the taper on C10 Skyline balljoints are quite different to any other Datsun, like Z, 510 or even Kenmeri. So it's not surprising that Victory50 had to go to quite a bit of trouble to make these.

I measure up the new ones as best I can...the fact that they are quite different parts mean that the old trick of counting how the turns as the original parts unscrew, won't work.

The only snag is that as I'm done, there's a light clunk as I swing the steering from lock to lock. I trace it back to this inner balljoint, which touches a bolt on the crossmember as it passes. Or rather...the split pin does.

I replace it with a new pin that I bent in a somewhat less elegant way, and that frees up enough millimetres to be fine. I think this is because the crossbar on my steering has a slight banana-bend to it, that isn't standard issue...I guess it must be from an accident sometime during its life in Japan....on second thoughts that looks awful. I'll do it again.

The last thing, are these.

The Hako has these snubbers that act as lock stops on the steering. I've never felt them during normal driving at all...when you reach full lock it isn't because you feel it hit a defined stop, it's as if you reach a point where the steering binds up. I figure this isn't good, so fit up these new stoppers with their plastic hats, and adjust them to 3.5 turns lock to lock. I'm not sure if that is the factory setting, and I think I might have to restrict the lock a bit more.

And that's it! A nice little refresh of the front end, and at this point the only things we haven't restored on the front suspension is the steering box and idler. Baz at Datsport has offered to take them apart and have a look whether anything needs to be done, so at some point I think I'll take em off and let him have his way with them.

For now, the steering feels nice and tight and more precise than before. Over bumps it seems as if a layer of slack has been taken out of the front end and it's much more solid-feeling. The steering is also about 1/8 turn out of whack too, so it seems that I suck at measuring up tie-rods and she'll be heading in for a wheel alignment on Monday. There's a few more jobs to do next week while I'm still on vacation though.

Oh, there were also a couple of other cool things recently...

I'd totally forgotten I had this.

I bought this in 2008 at the Tokyo Nostalgic Show, from this stall selling vintage posters and catalogs and stuff. I'd hidden it so well that I didn't find it again until now

These guys can somehow get a copy of the last Japanese registration certificate, and so I sent them the details of the Hako. It seems that the last time the car was registered, was in 2004, and the mileage at the time was 91,000km...and when I bought the car in 2007, the mileage was still the same. Hako has a 5-digit odometer, so who knows how many times it has been around the clock, but by the sounds of it, the car didn't turn a wheel at all between 2004 and 2007. When I bought the car, the dealer said that the paintjob and restoration was about 3yrs old, so I'd say 2004 was the point where the previous owner gave up on the restoration and mothballed the car.

That explains quite a lot about the condition of the Hako when I got it!

Do they only tell you the last time it was registered or the entire registration history?

I was the last one to register My Hako in Japan, it has 36K kilo's on the clock, i would LOVE to see if thats really the original numbers!!Mine was parked for 10 years when i bought it, so I guess its possible that it really has such low numbers.

You get the last couple of annual mileage readings, I believe. But only up to a certain time limit, so for the Hako I only got the last record. So it's not enough info to determine how many times the car has been around the clock.

Project Hakosuka may be many things, but one thing is for sure is that in the past 6yrs, it's certainly never been boring

Like the time I found a 4 inch long piece of sheetmetal floating about inside the sump...oh, wait...that was today I guess I better start at the beginning....

This morning, I used my engine beam to raise the motor off its mount. Basically to fit new engine mounts and a new oil pickup.

On the one side, I hook a chain to an unused bolthole on the cylinder head...

...and on the other side I used a hole on the side of the block.

Then slowly twist those big handles on the engine bar, and the engine rises off its mounts (which I unbolted from before). A few inches is all it needs before there's enough room to wiggle out the old mount.

The main reason for this job in the first place, was to investigate an oil surge issue. It mainly happens on the track, where I can see the oil pressure falling in hard left hand turns. But unless the oil level is all the way full, I can reproduce the effect on a winding road taken reasonably fast. So off comes the sway bar, which is necessary to make room to slide out the sump (after its gazillion bolts have been undone)

And straight away, I think the mystery is solved...with the sight of the oil pickup at an er, shall we say...rakish angle.

You can kinda see how it would affect the oil pressure in hard turns. On right hand turns, the oil pickup acts like a scoop for any oil sloshing to the right side of the sump. But on left handers, the hat on the oil pickup acts like a shield for oil sloshing to the left, which temporarily starves the pickup of oil.

I've sourced a new pickup, specifically for Hako Skyline, from Kameari Engine Works, and what a lovely bit of gear it is.

And, you can see straight away, that it's at a somewhat different angle to the pickup tube off the car I guess I can't be too hard on the guy who built the engine. When the motor is on an engine stand and is bolt upright, the angle of the pickup probably looks quite okay. I imagine it didn't occur to him that the L-series sits on quite a slant in a Hako.

Next step is to make a new gasket for the Kameari pickup, which is easy to do. Just take some gasket paper, and gently tap around the pickup (use the old pickup of course!) with a ballpein hammer

This will make an imprint on the gasket paper, and in fact will usually partially cut the holes as part of the process.

Finish the job with a blade, and hey presto, new gasket.

It's a good time to fit up the new engine mounts, which are much softer and fatter than the old ones.

Slot them in place, but leave them unbolted for now...all set, right? Just button it all up and look for the nearest winding road? Well, yeah. That was the plan

So I start to clean up the sump, so that I can fit up a new gasket and get it all back together. That's when I notice something rattling around inside one of the wings.

It took a bit of wiggling to get it out, but...here we are

Righto. What the hell is that doing in there.

I think the answer is this. The sump has a plate just behind the bowl, to prevent oil from sloshing to the back of the sump during acceleration. In Japan, the middle section of this plate was cut out to accommodate a really kludged up oil pickup tube which fouled against it.

During the rebuild, a new plate of steel looks like it was welded across that gaping hole. But, it looks like the welds didn't hold and that plate of steel went for quite a tour around the inside of the engine. But rather shockingly, all I can see in the way of damage to the rotating assembly, are a couple of nicks in a few of the crank weights.

And the odd scrape mark.

But the bores, rods and pistons looks to have escaped unharmed. My theory is that the crank swings below the gasket line of the sump. The builder probably didn't measure things right, and shortly after the rebuild...or maybe during the rebuild, the crank hit the new steel plate and tore it free of its welds.

The mind boggles as to how the engine is still a happy healthy running motor today. The thought of that plate getting whacked up into the bores, or sliding down into the bowl of the sump and getting sucked up into the pickup tube...thus blocking it off...is quite sobering. There's plenty of engine-kaboom scenarios which could have played out...but I reckon we've had quite a measure of blind luck here, and if the Hako sump was a conventional one, that bit of steel might have bounced around for a long time, causing more and more damage. But I think that shortly after that plate of steel came loose, got clobbered by the crankshaft and began its new life as a metal pretzel, it was sufficiently twisted that it fit into one of those holes that lead to the sump wing. And it probably never came back out again.

I suspect that this probably all happened a very long time ago, and that bit of steel has been trapped in the wing of the sump for years. You can see the witness marks on the inside of the sump as it got reshaped by the crank...

The question now is...what do we do? (It's not a rhetorical question...if you have an opinion please do share )

I think that the engine is...rather amazingly...okay. The question is whether we need to reinstate that plate across the back of the sump. Naturally, I would like to hear that it's not necessary and we don't have to tempt fate again by welding something in its place. Or...would it be okay to rivet say some 2mm aluminium in its place?

The mind boggles as to how the engine is still a happy healthy running motor today. The thought of that plate getting whacked up into the bores, or sliding down into the bowl of the sump and getting sucked up into the pickup tube...thus blocking it off...is quite sobering.

The question now is...what do we do? (It's not a rhetorical question...if you have an opinion please do share ) The question is whether we need to reinstate that plate across the back of the sump. Naturally, I would like to hear that it's not necessary and we don't have to tempt fate again by welding something in its place.

I say not necessary. If you really are concerned about starvation, those walls need to surround the pickup tube down in the sump. Away from the crank weights.

Hey. I would source one of those handmade high-capacity aluminum sumps for the L-series. They've got extra side galleries, and a full set of - we assume anyway - appropriately sized and positioned baffles. Plus, they look damn sexy... Neko.

Hey. I would source one of those handmade high-capacity aluminum sumps for the L-series. They've got extra side galleries, and a full set of - we assume anyway - appropriately sized and positioned baffles. Plus, they look damn sexy... Neko.

What brand are those, Skorj? I had a look at the Kameari and Victory50 sites, and neither of them offer anything like a modded sump.

The consensus seems to be to stick it back together without any improvised baffle, so today that's what we did

However before I got too carried away, I measured up how the new vs old oil pickups would fit. Here's the new one:

It's parallel to the floor of the sump and sits very close to the bottom

Measurements are that the mouth of the pickup tube is 8mm off the floor of the sump.

The old one, on the other hand, sits at an angle.

And because the mouth of the pipe is at an angle too, the top edge of the mouth is 28mm off the sump floor, so it's much more susceptible to sucking air as the oil sloshes around.

So I figure the new one should make it a lot better than it currently is

Time to fit up the sump, and Baz from Datsport's tip was to apply contact glue between the sump and the gasket

And between the gasket and the block, you apply an even smear of thick grease. The grease should remain solid and prevent leaks, and if you need to remove the sump again, the sump will drop without tearing the gasket, so you can recycle it a few times. Stewart Wilkins at SSS gave me similar advice once about sealing up a rocket cover gasket, too.

Then it's on with the zillion bolts...the ones above the wing with the plug in it are especially hard, there is only just enough room to stand up the bolt in there, let alone get a spanner to it.

Then lower the engine slowly until it's almost resting on the mounts. This part was easier than expected, the mounts are generously slotted, so there was plenty of wriggle room to get all the holes lined up.

And with that, she fired up and idled just fine I'll go for a proper drive in the next few days and report back as to whether the oil surge is still prevalent on hard left turns.

Well the surge seemed to be largely under control if I overfilled the sump by half a liter, so 5.2L in total. I guess it's also a good thing that the car's only been around Wakefield and Marulan which don't have much in the way of proper left hand corners. Eastern Creek would be another matter entirely tho, but I never did a trackday there.

I'm in the middle of a nice morning drive now and I'd say the surge in left hand turns is sorted. I deliberately filled the sump to only 3/4 on the dipstick and have given it a pretty good go and the surge hasn't reappeared.

The latest round of upgrades seem to have improved the car quite a bit too. The front end is now a lot tighter feeling and precise, and the new engine mounts have made it a lot smoother. It no longer shakes the car side to side at idle (which in hindsight was kinda a cool feature).

But I reckon there's now a cloud over the workmanship on the engine. The cylinder head was done by TK and is fine, but I reckon one of the projects for 2014 will be to pull the motor and freshen up the bottom end.

Hi. I am mobile this week, so a bit difficult to pull up references, but I think this guy was either handling or referred to making them: http://craftsman.uh-oh.jp . There was a page where he was making a three gauge pod somewhere... Neko.